Accelerated Blood Vessel Enhancement in Retinal

Fundus Image based on Recon gurable Hardware

Yuyao Wang  (  ywang10@lamar.edu )
Lamar University

Research Article

Keywords: Retinal blood vessel enhancement, matched lter, FPGA parallel acceleration

Posted Date: April 26th, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2839197/v1

License:   This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  
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Additional Declarations: No competing interests reported.

 Accelerated Blood Vessel Enhancement in Retinal Fundus
Image based on Reconfigurable Hardware
Yuyao Wang, Lamar University
Beaumont, Texas 77710
ywang10@lamar.edu
Abstract— Retinal blood vessel extraction and enhancement is
an intensively researched topic as it is an irreplaceable
component in ocular disease screening systems. The matched
filter method has been proven superior for blood vessel
extraction and enhancement compared to edge detection
algorithms in that it can extract blood vessel along its path and
retain blood vessel depth information even when blood vessels
are prone to be indistinguishable from the background. This
work has implemented matched filter method with Verilog
Hardware Description Language, taking advantage of the highly
customizable feature and parallel computation capabilities by
FPGA. The first proposed design method employs an innovative
resource-efficient technique based on matched filter technique. It
can be applied to situations where budget and physical resource
is limited. The second design method is a time-efficient processing
technique that provides further improvement in that it eliminates
the gap incurred in convolution between two rows of data. As has
been verified via simulation, it can offer a continuous output with
about 9% increase in processing speed for conducted simulation
compared to the first proposed technique.
Keywords— Retinal blood vessel enhancement, matched filter,
FPGA parallel acceleration.
I- INTRODUCTION
Eye-related diseases such as glaucoma and diabetic
retinopathy (DR) are viral and widespread today. One of the
most common causes of visual impairment in working-age
adults is diabetic retinopathy (DR), which is present in
diabetic individuals. DR could result in blindness in older
people worldwide if proper treatment is not received [1].
Glaucoma is also one of the most frequent causes of
permanent blindness. Many people in the U.S. are unaware of
the presence of glaucoma, although blindness is the third most
dreaded health concern after cancer and heart attacks [2].
Since blindness can be avoided via careful management and
treatment, raising public awareness is crucial and essential in
this fight. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) and scanning
laser polarimetry (SLP) are two commonly used advanced
imaging techniques for diagnosing glaucoma. OCT is a
powerful imaging method for diagnosing tissues because it
can produce cross-sectional pictures with excellent axial
resolution. It is notably helpful in the field of ophthalmology
since the imaging of the retina can be performed. Looking
through the back of the eye is made possible by the
transparency of the visual media [3-6]. Meanwhile,
measurements of the RNFL can be obtained using SLP, which
is based on the birefringence of the retinal ganglion cell axons.
These two techniques, however, are highly dependent on the
medical staff's expertise and experience and are not cost-
friendly technology. Retinal blood vessel extraction and
enhancement can be deployed not only for early diagnosis of
ocular diseases, e.g. diabetic retinopathy (DR), glaucoma etc.
However, it is also necessary for treatment planning and
execution and evaluating outcomes of performed surgeries
[7][8].
Some research efforts included a detailed comparison of
various blood vessel segmentation algorithms [9-11]. Moccia,
S. et al. have pointed it out [9], the use of deep learning
algorithms for segmenting vessels is gaining significant
popularity. Kumar, K. S. et al. also indicate [10] that the most
frequently used method in their survey is dependent on
machine learning and deep learning, where the two methods
are considered as one group. As opposed to machine learning
algorithms, deep learning directly extracts an appropriate
internal representation of an image. It contrasted with machine
learning algorithms, where the feature extraction process
requires excellent specialized skills to understand which
features are the most appropriate. Deep learning uses both the
rising processing power of GPU and the abundance of data.
Imran, A. et al. presented a comprehensive review of
supervised and unsupervised methods [11]. The former
includes Support Vector Machine (SVM) method, neural
network method, etc., while the latter includes matched filter
method, mathematical morphology, vessel tracking and
model-based methods. It also reports that the average accuracy
of deep learning techniques has increased to around 98%. Its
effectiveness and performance made it one of the most popular
techniques for vessel segmentation. Recent advances in deep
learning-based methods for retinal blood vessel segmentation
and enhancement are illustrated [12-15].
Some researchers also utilize deformable models for blood
vessel extraction and enhancement [16][17]. Since edge-based
deformable models are predominantly controlled by external
forces resulting from intensity or gradient, segmentation can
become challenging if curve initialization is performed at a
distance from the boundary of interest. In addition, the
boundary leakage problem is another issue for the edge-based
deformable model, which is particularly problematic when
working with noisy images or exhibiting a non-uniform
intensity. A common issue with algorithms using edge
detectors is their negligence of a blood vessel's feature of
having two edges running parallel. Therefore, it is expected to
observe low contrast between blood vessels and background
without further procedure. Shukla, A. K. et al. introduced a
fractional filter-based retinal vascular segmentation technique
[18]. The weighted fractional derivative was used to create the
fractional filter. The local covariance matrix's eigenvalue
mappings and a fractional filter are both used in the suggested
method. The centerline pixels and vessel borders acquired by
the difference eigenvalue map are thresholded and refined
over the structures discovered by the initial eigenvalue maps.
Ooi, A. Z. H. et al. [19] proposed a revised and improved
version of the Canny operator and a GUI to perform blood
vessel extraction. While the GUI offers intuitive operation
with a mouse and keyboard, it inherits the drawback of
traditional edge detection, where the operation is executed
sequentially. Dash, S. et al. suggested the combined use of
discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and the Tyler Coye
algorithm to extract blood vessels from fundus image [20]
automatically. An improved method is also proposed where
Gamma Correction is integrated into the first proposed
combined model. This method takes advantage of all three
channels of a retinal image, which is different from many
other researchers' suggestions that only the Green channel is
used. Therefore it is reported to provide optimal accuracy as
well as specificity. Before blood vessels can be detected by
employing the Tyler Coye algorithm, image pre-processing
steps are needed, and image data in RGB format are combined
and transformed to the YIQ domain. The reported superior
performance of this method comes at the cost of lengthy
execution time. In addition, it is reported to have unevenness
in the walls.
Another major branch of blood vessel extraction and
enhancement employs combined deep learning techniques
with various filters. For example, Tchinda, B. S. et al. [21]
proposed the combined use of edge detection filters and neural
network, where the features vector are obtained by using a
series of filters, i.e., Sobel filter, Canny filter, Robert filter,
Laplacian of Gaussian, and morphological transformation
before it can be fed into the neural network for training. This
data preparation process consumes a considerable amount of
time. Li, M. et al. [22] adopted a deep learning approach and
proposed a Pixel-wise Adaptive Filter, built on U-Net, for
further refinement of the previously generated coarse
segmentation map. The method proposed by Erwin, Safmi et
al. [23] uses CLAHE and median filter in series for increasing
the contrast of the grayscale and enhancing image quality,
respectively, and data augmentation is accomplished by
performing mathematical manipulation, i.e., horizontal flip,
vertical flip, and vertical reverse flip, to increase the diversity
of retinal image data from the preceding stage of a median
filter. The augmentation results would then be fed into the U-
net neural network for training. Ghani, A. et al. [24] proposed
the combined use of frontend data preprocessing and backend
image classification to make predictions about retinal fundus
images. The data preprocessing procedure is operated
sequentially using an adaptive thresholding technique. In
summary, techniques relying on general-purpose CPUs or
GPUs have the drawback of being executed in series that offer
little paralleled operation, are costly to implement and are
cumbersome in terms of portability.
An increasingly appealing trend for blood vessel extraction
and enhancement is by providing hardware acceleration.
Bendaoudi, H. et al. [25] presented two matched filter-based
blood vessel segmentation architectures, one of which is
implemented using VHDL hardware description language.
Though the VHDL code was generated automatically using
their developed tool, which could bring efficiency in the
designing stage, it inherits the drawback from the convolution
operation of having an interruption or gap between two rows
of data. Hajabdollahi, M. et al. [26] proposed an artificial
neural network-based system. To provide real time processing
and ease of implementation on FPGA, the network has been
simplified, which requires a compensation method for
deteriorated accuracy. Xiang, W. et al. [27] proposed and
implemented the matched filter-based design on an FPGA
platform for a vein imaging system. However, it consumed an
excessive amount of physical resources. It did not fully exploit
the advantage of hardware acceleration and thus had an
inherent gap when producing output data, which weakens its
ability to be deployed in physically constrained applications
and to offer real-time data processing. To tackle the
abovementioned two issues, this work presents two
techniques. The first technique can be considered the baseline
of retinal blood vessel enhancement algorithm based on
matched filter while the second offers further accelerated
processing speed.
This work is organized as follows. Section II presents the
matched filter methodology. Section III illustrates the
structure of the first proposed matched filter-based technique,
and section IV details the second proposed technique. Results
and discussions are provided in Section V. Section VI
summarize the conclusion of this paper.
II. MATCHED FILTER METHODOLOGY
One-dimensional match filter design is a typical
demodulation approach in signal processing systems, where
only the magnitude of signal s(t) changes concerning time. A
matched filter is created when a predefined mask or template
is correlated with an unknown signal to determine if the
template is present in the unknown signal. Thus from the
perspective of improving SNR on the output, matched filter is
a linear filter that maximizes the SNR in the presence of
additive stochastic noise. It can be deployed in a typical
communication system where N inputs are fed into it. If the ith
filter produced the maximum response, it could be determined
that input Si(t) was transmitted through the system.
Extending the matching filter approach to two-dimensional
images necessitates considering target orientation information.
The output of matched filter s(t) reaches its maximum value
when an image pixel is aligned with the matched filter at an
angle 𝜃 ± 𝜋/2. Therefore, the algorithm first makes the filter
rotated for all possible angles from 0 to 180 degrees to include
all possible scenarios of blood vessel angle, then record only
the maximum output for each image pixel.
Chaudhuri, S. et al. introduced a two-dimensional matched
filter for detecting blood vessels in retinal images [28]. The
matched filter was developed based on three key features of
retinal blood vessels: (a) their modest degree of curvature
makes it possible for a succession of piecewise linear
segments to serve as a reasonable approximation for them; (b)
due to their inferior reflectivity compared to the remainder of
the retinal image, they seem darker than the background; (c)
their width falls between a predetermined threshold and the
background. Examination of the gray-level distributions in
retinal fundus pictures reveals that a Gaussian function can
roughly model the intensity distributions of blood vessels. It is
a fact that the shape of the optimally matched filters has to
come as close as possible to the geometry of the vessel. The
mathematical expression of the ideal filter can be stated as the conversion, the grayscale image went through matched
Equation (1): filter operation, and the final results were normalized and
shown in Figure 3 (b). It confirms the feasibility and
−𝑥2 effectiveness of matched filter-based algorithms for retinal
𝐿
𝐾(𝑥, 𝑦) = −𝑒 2𝜎2 , |𝑥| ≤ 3𝜎, |𝑦| ≤ (1) blood vessel enhancement. The subsequent research effort is
2
In this Equation, the width of blood vessels is denoted by based on this established algorithm for further improvement.
the letter 𝜎, and the length of blood vessels is denoted by the
letter L. The value for 𝜎 and L is taken as 2 and 9,
respectively, as pre-defined parameters in this work as retinal
blood vessels are arbitrarily oriented at any angle 𝜃 ( 0 ≤ 𝜃 ≤
𝜋 ), matched filters should also be rotated to be aligned with
target blood vessels. The proposed design employs 12
matched filters to accurately estimate target blood vessels,
with a 15° angle difference between two adjacent filters.
Assume 𝑃𝑖 = [x,y] is a discrete point in the matched filter (a) (b) (c)
kernel and 𝜃𝑖 is the orientation of the ith kernel matched to a
blood vessel at an angle 𝜃𝑖 . The weighting coefficients are
computed based on the assumption that each Gaussian kernel
has its centre at the origin point[0,0]. The rotation matrix can
be expressed as (2):

cos 𝜃𝑖 −sin 𝜃𝑖
𝑅𝑖 = (2) (d) (e) (f)
sin 𝜃𝑖 cos 𝜃𝑖

The new corresponding location after rotation is given by

matrix multiplication 𝑃𝑖 = [u,v] =𝑃 ∗ 𝑅𝑖 . In light of the work of
Chaudhuri S. et al. and the fact that the Gaussian function can
be visualized as an infinitely long curve with two tails, we
trimmed down the infinite length Gaussian function to a
region of size N, which is defined as (g) (h) (i)
𝐿
𝑁 = {(𝑢, 𝑣||𝑢| ≤ 3𝜎), |𝑣| ≤ } (3)
2

The weighting coefficients that have been rotated in the ith

kernel can be represented as u and v, which are the updated
coordinates that have been generated due to the rotation. The
average value of the kernel is calculated using Equation (4) if
(j) (k) (l)
the number of points in a region N is known to be A:
Fig 1. 12 Convolution kernels designed
1
𝑚𝑖 = ∑𝑝𝑖 𝑘𝑖 (𝑥, 𝑦) (4)
𝐴

The average value of the convolution kernel coefficients

must be zero so that the original properties of the background
grayscale characteristics of the image remain unchanged. As a
result, the final filter convolution kernel can be derived by
making some adjustments to Equation (1) by subtracting 𝑚𝑖 :
1
𝐾′(𝑥, 𝑦) = 𝐾(𝑥, 𝑦) − ∑𝑝𝑖 𝑘𝑖 (𝑥, 𝑦) (5)
𝐴

Based on the above theory, 12 convolution kernels were

designed. The first convolution kernel of 0 degrees was
designed as a 17*17 grayscale image shown as (a) in Figure 1. Fig 2. Original retinal blood vessel image
With 15 degrees angular resolution, the other 11 kernels can
be obtained, shown from (b) to (l) in Figure 1.
The matched filter-based retinal blood vessel enhancement
algorithm has been designed in MATLAB. The retinal fundus III. RESOURCE-EFFICIENT DESIGN BASED ON MATCHED FILTER
image is shown in Figure 2. The original colored image was
first converted into grayscale, as shown in Figure 3 (a). After
1. Improvement of the first matched filter-based technique
The matched filter is an effective method for blood vessel
extraction and enhancement as when the image data is
convoluted with a pre-defined kernel, only the pixels that
match the kernel the most would produce a maximum
response and thus should be retained, while background image
data would be eliminated.
(a) (b)
(c) (d)
Fig 3. (a) original grayscale image
(b) blood vessel enhanced image
(c) sliced grayscale image
(d) enhanced sliced image
A previous effort by Xiang, W. et al. [27] proposed a near-
infrared vein imaging system, which includes a matched filter-
based blood vessel enhancement model implemented on
FPGA. The structure of their suggested matched filter design
can be summarized as shown in Figure 4. The procedure starts
with reading image data from an external CMOS image
sensor, which is then stored in FPGA resources and gets ready
to go through matched filters in parallel. Each matched filter
has a separate shift register to store the input image data and
for convolution operation. It is a convenient design method,
given that the matched filter can be used as an intact
functioning unit and be instantiated in a top design module
according to the number of convolution kernels needed. From
the perspective of model reuse and parallel computation, four
modules of the matched filter can run in parallel, which
greatly increases the processing speed for blood vessel
enhancement. However, one of the drawbacks is that the shift
registers used to read and store input data pixel by pixel and
the data windows used for convolution are all the same in
these four modules, making them hardware redundancies that
could disable the matched filter in certain physically
constrained circumstances. Therefore, in the proposed design
technique I, the shift register and data window for convolution
are both designed to be shared resources among different
convolution operations. It is feasible because their convolution
kernel is the only difference among the paralleled convolution
operations. Therefore, using the same input pixel data to
convolute with different kernels can eliminate excessive
hardware overhead and achieve physical efficiency while
keeping the functionality unchanged.
2. Procedure of MRMF
The first FPGA-based retinal blood vessel enhancement
design structure is the Minimal Resource Matched Filter
technique (MRMF), the structure of which is shown in Figure
5. Firstly, the image data is fed into FPGA directly from
external imaging systems such as a fungus camera or an
external file stored on a hard drive. Then a shift register is
utilized as a buffer to read the input image data pixel by pixel,
which then passes the data on to the downstream window data
module when needed. The window data module is designed to
be the same size as the convolution kernel, and its content
would be updated to the preceding shift register module during
the convolution operation. Downstream convolution modules
are designed to have 12 convolutions running in parallel, each
of which takes a predefined independent kernel as its input,
yielding a better angular resolution than four convolution
kernels would have. All responses of the 12 convolutions
would be sent to the Max module simultaneously for value
comparison that ignores all but the largest response as the final
enhanced pixel result, eliminating background and noisy
pixels. The convolution module includes all 12 convolution
operations with their corresponding kernels in this design
method. Therefore, it only needs to be instantiated once in the
top design module. In this way, it presents the distinctive
advantage of avoiding excessive usage of shift registers and
regular data registers while keeping the functional unit in one
module. However, it comes at the cost of losing some
flexibility and portability in light of the procedures. All
convolution operations are designed in the same module,
making it time consuming to modify the module applicable to
other blood vessel enhancement scenarios with different
parameters or even different numbers of kernels.
 Fig 4. Structure of matched filter design in [27]

(c) Last 16 results from Modelsim Simulation

(d) Last 16 results from MATLAB Simulation

Fig 7. Last 16 simulation results comparison between Modelsim and

MATLAB

IV. PARALLEL CONTINUOUS MATCHED FILTER TECHNIQUE

Fig 5. Structure diagram for proposed MRMF design 1. Improvement of proposed PCMF
Another drawback of the matched filter-based technique
3. Simulation and verification of MRMF proposed by Xiang, W. et al. [27] is that the convolution
process is inherently interrupted between two rows of image
It is evident from the structure diagram that sharing the shift
data, as shown in Figure 8. This 8 clock cycle interruption is
registers and window data registers can achieve minimum
due to the process of the convolution operation. For a
hardware consumption, as all modules with the same
convolution kernel of size k*k, this interruption of data flow
functionality have been designed to use shared physical
typically lasts for k-1 clock cycles, and the convolution
resources. The convolution kernel is chosen to be rotated
operation can produce one valid output every clock cycle. As
every 15° with a total of 12 convolution operations for one-
convolution is conducted using a sliding window, it takes k-1
pixel data to maintain a better angular resolution. With the
clock cycles to be filled up with new data and ready for
input image size being 96*96, the shift register size is 9*96.
convolution of the next row. The simulation result shown in
The size of shift registers and convolution kernel are both
Figure 8 shows that the last data from the first row is 596. The
reconfigurable depending on the image resolution and size,
output has remained unchanged for 9 clock cycles because the
making it applicable to be deployed in most on-site
process of the shift register is updated content.
applications. Based on this methodology, a matched filter-
based retinal blood vessel enhancement design is implemented
with Verilog hardware programming language. Input retina
image is taken from the DRIVE dataset[29]. The image
simulation result from Modelsim is shown in Figure 6(a) and
Figure 7(c), while Figure 6(b) and Figure 7(b) are results
produced purely on MATLAB. The response generated from
Modelsim simulation is directly fed into MATLAB for image
Fig 8. Simulation from Modelsim showing 8 clock gap between two rows
analysis and demonstration. The comparison indicates that the
simulation results from FPGA are identical to those from
MATLAB.

(a) First 16 results from Modelsim Simulation

(b) First 16 results from the MATLAB simulation

Fig 6. First 16 simulation results comparison between Modelsim and

MATLAB
Fig 9. Parallel Continuous Matched Filter technique
 To eliminate the interruption of convolution between two
rows of data, the Parallel Continuous Matched Filter technique
is proposed, abbreviated as PCMF hereafter. It mainly tackles
the issue of interrupted output inherent in the convolution
process. The PCMF structure is shown in Figure 9. Ten shift
registers, namely SR1 to SR10, take their turns to read data
from the corresponding RAM so that seamless convolution
can be conducted.
2. Procedure of proposed PCMF
The region of interest (ROI) in the target retinal images is
decreased by eight pixels so that the pixels closest to the
border can be discarded. It is reasonable because the number
of pixels utilized in calculating the local average intensity in
the middle is greater than the number of pixels utilized closest
to the border. The step size is 1, and the padding size is 0 for
the convolution operations. With shift registers of size 9*96
and convolution kernel size being 9*9, the resulting image
after convolution would be 88*88, a total of 7744 pixels as
suggested by Equation (6), where 𝑁 suggests the output image
size after convolution is 𝑁 ∗ 𝑁, 𝑊 indicates the input image
size is 𝑊 ∗ 𝑊 , 𝐹 means convolution kernel size is 𝐹 ∗ 𝐹 ,
convolution step is 𝑆, and padding step is 𝑃. Shift registers are
used to shift out input image data during convolution, and
window data is designed to take corresponding values in the
shift register to perform convolution with a predefined kernel.
Each shift register and window data pair can produce a
continuous convolution result for one row of input data, which
includes 88 output pixels. However, before starting this
operation, it takes the first shift register 864 clock cycles to be
filled with 9*96 pixels of image data and ready for
convolution. Therefore, to reuse the first shift register for
another row of convolution, one has to wait for at least 864
clock cycles before the stored data can be replaced with
updated ones as convolution kernel size is 9*9 and a
continuous 9 rows of image data has to be in the shift register.
To eliminate the timing gap between two rows of convolution,
10 shift registers are required to take their turns and do the
convolution so that the outputs from 10 independent
convolutions would consume 88*10=880 clock cycles, more
than enough for a reused shift register to be filled up with
updated data.
𝑊−𝐹+2𝑃
𝑁= +1 (6)
𝑆
3. Controlling shift registers and convolutions
A well-organized shift register would take turns reading the
image data and producing the output needed for convolution.
Otherwise, the 10 shift registers would be out of control
easily. The proposed design structure is based on the working
procedure built on three counters, cnt0, cnt1 and cnt2, as
shown in Figure 10. The first counter cnt0 is used to counter
88 clock cycles so that two adjacent shift registers can be 88
clock cycles apart, indicating the second shift register would
start to read image pixel data 88 clock cycles after the first
shift register starts to read so that the second row of
convolution output can follow up the first one. They can
produce convolution results of two rows of data without any
gap in between. The second counter cnt1 is used to count the
repetition of 88 clock cycles. When it is equal to the maximum
value 9, it means all ten shift registers have started to read
input pixel data and register one has already finished
generating the first row of data output, so one can reuse the
first shift register and data window pair for the convolution of
the 11th row. The third and last counter in the design structure
cnt2 is used to count the repetitions every shift register goes
through. As the final output includes 88 rows of data, 10 shift
registers would be reused 9 times with the last two reused 8
times as they are not needed for the last round, eventually
producing a total of 88*10*8+88*8=88*88=7744 pixels as
expected.
Controlling the read-enabling signal of each shift register
and the start and stop of each convolution will be tedious if
they are to be designed independently as separate enabling
signals. Therefore, they are designed using one signal with
multiple bits, each bit controlling a corresponding shift
register. For example, the read signal shown in Figure 11 is
designed to change simultaneously with cnt1 when cnt2 is
zero because that is the time frame for the ten shift registers to
read input pixel data, and no output is produced. With the
three-counter structure, one can control the shift registers and
convolution operations without a separate lengthy state
machine. As mentioned before, it takes 864 clock cycles for a
shift register to be filled up and ready to start convolution.
Therefore, the first shift register reads input pixel data when
cnt1 is less than 9 and has to stop reading data when cnt0 is 71
and cnt1 is 9, which is 864 clock cycles. Similar to the other
shift registers, each shift register is delayed 88 clock cycles
between them. The first shift register starts to do the
convolution the moment cnt2 changes from 0 to 1, and it
would take 88 cycles to finish. After that, convolutions from
the other 9 shift registers follow up. When the first shift
register is doing convolution, it is also reading another row of
input data simultaneously so that when the 10th shift register
finishes producing the output, the first one can start doing
convolution for the 11th row of data. The same pattern of
reading and doing convolution can be repeated until the full
image data is processed.
Fig 10. Structure of counters
Fig 11. Designing read enable signal for shift registers
4. Simulation and verification of PCMF technique is superior to traditional CPU-based software
With an FPGA RAM block able to offer two ports reading implementations on MATLAB in terms of processing speed.
simultaneously, this design technique would require a total of
5 independent RAMs, each of which would support two
independent shift registers.
The first step in this PCMF technique is to read the sliced
image data and store the data in five separate RAMs on
FPGA. Each RAM is configured to be a dual-port RAM so
that two separate convolution operations can be conducted one
after another. Subsequently, the convolution operation is
scheduled to start the moment shift register1 has received all
864 pixels of data, and the result is sent to the Max module for
value comparison so that the maximum value of the 12
convolution results can be retained as the final result of the
corresponding input image pixel. Given that 12 different input
values in the Max module would require 4 different
comparisons for a final maximum value, it would take the
Max module 5 clock cycles to produce a max value for a set of
12 input data from the upstream module, with one clock cycle
timing slack introduced for data synchronization. To produce
an output data for every clock cycle, the Max module has been
designed to operate at a 5x higher frequency than the Fig 13. Processing speed comparison between CPU and FPGA
convolution module. It can be implemented on an FPGA
without effort by instantiating a built-in PLL module. The
Most of the previously matched filter-based techniques were
simulated results can be seen in Figure 12, where out_cnt is
proposed for one-dimensional processing signals[30][31], the
the output pixel counter, and out_data is the generated output
structure of which is shown in Figure 14 (a). Figure 14 (b) and
pixel data. The last output pixel data in the first row is 596
(c) compare the structures between [27] and the proposed
when out_cnt is 88, and pixel data in the second row instantly
PCMF technique. It is revealed that PCMF exploits further
follow up with no gap in between.
parallelism in matched filter structure by using on-chip RAM
as an image data buffer. By using five separate RAMs in a
single convolution module, continuous convolution without a
gap can be achieved, as previously verified and shown in
Figure 12. Processing speed comparison for different kernel
sizes has also been conducted and shown in Figure 15. The
input image is 96*96 pixels, and the output is 88*88 pixels. As
is indicated in the figure, the processing time for a traditional
Fig 12. Output data indicating no gap between two rows of data matched filter-based FPGA implementation increases linearly
as kernel size increases. The proposed PCMF technique offers
V. RESULTS COMPARISON constant processing time for a given input image as it
eliminates the gap between two rows of data during
The first proposed Minimal Resource Matched Filter convolution. Therefore, the extra time consumed by a
technique is superior to the design in [27] because it improves traditional matched filter without the PCMF method,
overall physical efficiency. The Parallel Continuous Matched represented by the green line in Figure 15, increases with
Filter technique offers further improvement compared to increasing kernel size.
MRMF as it eliminates the gap when generating output
between two rows of output pixel data. In Figure 13, the
processing time needed is recorded and compared between the
MRMF method implemented in FPGA and a pure software-
matched filter method implemented on MATLAB for various
numbers of pictures. Processing time for the pure software
method was recorded during simulation in MATLAB R2020a
with a parallel pool set to 64 workers on an AMD EPYC 7B12
64-core server processor. MATLAB simulation was repeated
10 times for a given number of pictures, and the average
processing time was recorded along with positive and negative
variations shown as red bars on the plot. Meanwhile, the
processing time for FPGA is calculated based on a clock (a) 1-D matched filter structure [30][31]
frequency of 100MHz. It shows that the proposed MRMF
 Conv(N*M)
Input Buffer Max Value
Conv(N*M)
(b) 2-D matched filter structure [27]
(c) structure of the proposed PCMF
Fig 14. Structure comparison between matched filter techniques
Fig 15. Computational efficiency comparison for different kernel sizes
A further comparison, shown in Figure 16, is made between
PCMF and [27], where the core frequency of FPGA is set to
100MHz, so processing time for both techniques can be
calculated using clock period 10ns. The improvement in
processing speed is calculated to be (TPCMF-T[27])/T[27]=8.99%,
where TPCMF, T[27] are processing times for the PCMF
technique and [27], respectively. There is expected to be more
speed improvement if the image size is smaller or convolution
kernel size is larger, as indicated in Figure 15.
Fig 16. Computational efficiency comparison between PCMF and [27]
VI. RESULTS CONCLUSION
Some researchers have suggested a two-dimensional
matched filter for retinal blood vessel segmentation and
enhancement, which has been evaluated as an effective
technique. However, very few publications target the issue of
excessive resource consumption of matched filters
implemented on FPGA or releasing the full potential
processing speed of a hardware-implemented matched filter
technique.
This work presents two matched filter-based retinal blood
vessel enhancement techniques. The first Minimal Resource
Matched Filter technique aims to reduce excessive physical
resource exploitation for budget or physical resource-
constrained applications while maintaining the advantage of
accelerated parallel convolution due to the implementation of
the matched filter algorithm on FPGA. Contrary to the
previous technique that employs different shift registers for
different convolutions, even when the input pixel data is the
same, one can design the shift register as a shared resource
among different convolution kernels. Therefore, minimal
resource consumption can be achieved. The second proposed
Parallel Continuous Matched Filter technique offers further
speed improvement based on the first one in that it eliminates
the inherent gap incurred in a convolution operation between
two rows of data. This technique uses five dual-port RAM
blocks for input data storage. Two shift registers are employed
for each RAM block to perform convolution in a pipelined
manner, which eliminates the gap between two rows of data.
Simulations have been carried out in Modelsim and MATLAB
as a comparison.
It has been revealed that the two proposed FPGA-based
techniques offer highly accelerated processing of retinal blood
vessel enhancement, especially compared with traditional
CPU-based software implementation. The PCMF technique
offers a further improvement of around 9% in processing
speed compared to the first proposed Minimal Resource
Matched Filter technique. It can be deployed where real-time
processing and the instant evaluation result are desired while
additional hardware requirement is an acceptable tradeoff. segmentation method based on deep learning network. Computerized
Medical Imaging and Graphics, 90, 101902.
Future research endeavors shall be made to reduce the
[14] Chen, C., Chuah, J. H., Ali, R., & Wang, Y. (2021). Retinal vessel
physical resources consumed by PCMF and to design a segmentation using deep learning: a review. IEEE Access, 9, 111985-
collaborative system where the proposed technique shall be 112004.
used as a hardware acceleration module. [15] Yang, Y., Wan, W., Huang, S., Zhong, X., & Kong, X. (2022). RADCU-
Net: residual attention and dual-supervision cascaded U-Net for retinal
blood vessel segmentation. International Journal of Machine Learning
Declarations and Cybernetics, 1-16.
[16] Samant, P., Bansal, A., & Agarwal, R. (2020). A hybrid filtering-based
Ethical Approval retinal blood vessel segmentation algorithm. In Computer Vision and
Machine Intelligence in Medical Image Analysis: International
No human or animal studies. Symposium, ISCMM 2019 (pp. 73-79). Springer Singapore.
[17] Jin, Q., Meng, Z., Pham, T. D., Chen, Q., Wei, L., & Su, R. (2019).
Competing interests DUNet: A deformable network for retinal vessel segmentation.
No conflict of interest. Knowledge-Based Systems, 178, 149-162.
[18] Shukla, A. K., Pandey, R. K., & Pachori, R. B. (2020). A fractional filter
based efficient algorithm for retinal blood vessel segmentation.
Funding Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 59, 101883.
No funding was received for this work. [19] Ooi, A. Z. H., Embong, Z., Abd Hamid, A. I., Zainon, R., Wang, S. L.,
Ng, T. F., ... & Ibrahim, H. (2021). Interactive blood vessel segmentation
from retinal fundus image based on canny edge detector. Sensors, 21(19),
Availability of data and materials 6380.
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no new datasets [20] Dash, S., & Senapati, M. R. (2020). Enhancing detection of retinal blood
were generated or analyzed during this study. vessels by combined approach of DWT, Tyler Coye and Gamma
correction. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 57, 101740.
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